Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

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I thought that's pretty much standard procedure for low level drug offenses: "please guilty and get only a few years or go to trial and risk 30 years". The rational decision is most likely to go for a few years and not risk the 30. In my view plea bargains should be abolished and everyone should go to trial.

But very few go to trial because the courts cannot afford to try that many cases. So, like most social issues, where does the money come from?

Edit: I want to be clear. I agree with your point, but observing the obvious roadblock to implementation.

There are far too many cases being brought into our courts for silly or erroneous charges. We need to end the war on drugs, for one, and stop prosecuting low-level offenses so harshly. This would reduce a huge amount of the load on the court system.

There are a lot of companies that make a ton of money off of having more people in prison. Maybe we should just tax them.

In any case, I think it's important to realize we cannot let widespread Constitutional violations go unchecked. It's not that there's no money. The real problem is that there are so many entities profiting from this unjust system that no one bothers to look for solutions in the first place.

You let them go free. "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."

If you actually have so many people committing crimes that there are actually too many guilty people for the courts to properly try, you have a societal engineering problem, not a courtroom efficiency problem - you need to get people to stop committing those crimes in the first place, since clearly the justice system isn't working as a deterrent. There are lots of options, including changing social conditions, reclassifying the behavior at issue as not a crime, etc.

This mentality is hard to get to for a lot of folks. It doesn't just hit this issue.

Let's talk about race. When a white supremacist wants to kills some folks, sure, that's a problem and we should try to detect, prevent, mitigate, and punish (in that order) their actions.

However, the real issue to solve at a higher level is the societal engineering one where large segments of the population feel a need to turn towards white nationalism. Note: I don't mean "let's make thoughtcrime a thing". I assume the issue is that racially homogeneous rural areas end up with a combination of little welfare and little economic opportunity.

In the medium/long-run, these sorts of issues require UBI, an improved education system, public transportation, and universal healthcare of some sort. That's a tall order and hard sell, so we're left demonizing individuals (treating symptoms).

White rural areas in fact get more federal welfare benefits than urban areas.

The Eighth Amendment requires that citizens be given a speedy and public trial.

Very few go to trial because of false-carrots-on-a-stick plea deals to throw someone away without the trial, because the prosecutors know the trial may not go for them.

I wonder if it could be argued that plea deals deprive a citizen of their right to a speedy trial, and are therefore unconstitutional?

Some amendments are more strongly enforced than others. Also, it's the 6th that's a speedy trial. The 8th is the equally-ignored excessive fines and punishment.

At least the 3rd is still going strong!

Oh whoops I read them out of order in the list talking about the drafting of The Constitution. It may have been the 8th in an original list but two below it were not ratified. I am not worthy!

regardless of the amendment number, there has been zero clarity from the Supreme Court about what fair and speedy means.

As such, there are people in prison for almost a decade without a trial because they couldn't afford bail, see the Riker's Island cases.

This is not what I had in mind and I think this result undermines the social contract people have in mind for this country.

Frankly, if the courts can't handle the load of the minor cases, those cases should be dropped in favor of pursuing the more severe ones. The courts should be damn well certain someone is in fact guilty before convicting him instead of copping out and allowing plea bargains.

Which then brings up the thorny issue of which cases to drop, and why make those things illegal in the first place. I don't know what the alternative is though. Maybe Judge Dredd style law enforcement of police, judge and jury in one job..

If plea deals were not allowed and cases had to go to trial (with adequate support for public defenders), we (as a society) would find satisfactory answers to those questions. It doesn't mean it would be easy, but if the pressure were there, we'd find a solution. Fewer cases would be heard, fewer people would be jailed, and a truer justice would be served.

Plea bargains allow the justice system to effectively ignore all those costs and instead push them onto a non-representative subset of society.

In many countries judge and jury is one job - it does have downsides of course, but the way juries are selected in the U.S., I think I prefer it.

That's a good point. Others have answered that and I agree with them. But we also have to work with what we have. Petty things like drug possession should be decriminalized. However, good luck getting Congress or state legislatures to decriminalize minor things that aren't en vogue like marijuana. Taxes should be raised to fund the courts and other vital services. But everyone hates taxes so I doubt that will happen either. I'd really like to avoid the Judge Dredd style enforcement that we seem to be slowly approaching.

Good point. Maybe if we made fewer things illegal we wouldn't have more people incarcerated per capita than any other country ever.

Trials are actually not that expensive. What's expensive is risking sending someone to prison for 30+ years.

We simply can't enforce the laws as written, but it's considered easier to avoid enforcing them than to come up with reasonable laws.

Misdemeanor trials cost $20,000 in an exemplar US county [0]. And that's only for the prosecution... take into account the salaries of court employees (judge, steganographer, etc) and utilities and things add up. Whether that is cheap or expensive depends on what you're comparing it to.

Cost of pleading? Maybe a couple hundred dollars.

Cost of ruining someone's life over a drug charge? Maybe worth tenz of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[0] https://www.news-journal.com/news/2011/nov/01/court-costs-ov...

These prices are very regional. New York State spends ~60,000$ per prisoner per year. So, a teen spending 60 years in prison (ignoring inflation) = 3.6 million directly + plus lost wages.

If you can't afford to deal with the consequences of laws you either need less laws or put more money into the system.

Also, sending innocent people to prison because of please bargains costs a lot of money. It's very possible that having real trials and not sending innocent people to jail is cheaper overall.

I don't know, taxes? Fair and speedy trials are enshrined in the Constitution. Presumably it's in the public interest to actually provide them...

> the courts cannot afford

Most countries in the world manage to have due process. Also the US is one of the wealthiest countries.

Of the 200 or so countries in the world, most of them do not have an effective, fair justice system, available to all. Without that as a minimum, have a defined process is largely meaningless.

You get rid of all those pointless laws.

Yup. And when this happened to me with a bogus possession case, I fought the law and the law won. Sentenced with maximum jail-time and fines :)

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